Accuracy record
Where widely-published reference values are wrong, and where ours were. Every finding names the governing instrument and tells you how to check it without trusting us.
This exists because provenance is the product. Anyone can publish a number. The claim worth making is that a number was read from the instrument that creates it, on a date, and is re-checked — and that claim is only worth anything if we also publish what we got wrong.
Findings come from reading primary sources, not from comparing one aggregator against another. Where a discrepancy could not be reproduced from a public document, it is not listed. We name instruments, not vendors.
Where commonly-published values are wrong
1 finding.
South Africa — the VAT registration threshold is no longer R1 million
Commonly published: That compulsory VAT registration in South Africa is triggered at R1 million of taxable supplies over 12 months, with voluntary registration from R50 000. The figure is unusually deeply embedded: it stood unchanged for roughly seventeen years, long enough to be hard-coded into onboarding checks, accounting-software defaults, guidance notes and training material.
What the source actually says: The compulsory threshold is R2.3 million and the voluntary floor is R120 000, both with effect from 1 April 2026. SARS states it directly: 'From 1 April 2026, the compulsory VAT registration threshold increased from R1 million to R2.3 million.' The registration page carries the new figure in its own words — registration is required 'where the value of taxable supplies made in any consecutive 12 month period exceeded or is likely to exceed R2.3 million'. A check still using R1 million will tell a business with R1.5 million of turnover that it must register when it need not, and will not flag that an already-registered vendor below R2.3 million may now have grounds to deregister.
Instrument: Value-Added Tax Act 89 of 1991 registration threshold as increased with effect from 1 April 2026, announced in Budget 2026 and published by SARS on its VAT registration page and in its Budget 2026 FAQ
Check it yourself: Open the SARS 'Register for VAT' page and read the threshold in the compulsory-registration paragraph. If a source says R1 million, check whether it has been updated since March 2026 — that single figure dates the document.
Where we were wrong
3 errors found in data or code we had already shipped. All are fixed; each is listed with what caused it.
Namibia — we were missing Genocide Remembrance Day
What was wrong: 28 May was declared by Proclamation 19/2024 (Government Gazette 8373). We had not carried it. Same class of failure as Colombia: a holiday created by an instrument issued after we first built the calendar.
Instrument: Proclamation 19/2024, Government Gazette 8373
Check it yourself: Compare our /v1/na/public-holidays against the proclamation.
Angola — we modelled a repealed article
What was wrong: We were missing 23 March and were applying the pre-2018 Artigo 6.º weekend-transfer rule, which had been amended. Two errors compounding: a missing day, and a transfer rule that moved other days incorrectly.
Instrument: Lei that amended Artigo 6.º (post-2018 text)
Check it yourself: Compare our /v1/ao/public-holidays against the consolidated law currently in force.
We returned HTTP 500 on two countries for part of a day
What was wrong: A guard added to stop working-days selling wrong answers past our calendar coverage did not account for holiday entries with a deliberately null date (ungazetted placeholders). Sorting put null last and the coverage computation threw. Trinidad and Guyana returned 500 until it was fixed. The guard itself was correct and necessary; the null-handling was not.
Instrument: (internal — commit 8087e21 through d4dc14b)
Check it yourself: POST /v1/answers/working-days for tt or gy. It now refuses or answers, never 500s.
What changed so these are caught sooner
The costliest errors we have found share one cause: a value that was correct when written and was invalidated later by a new instrument. Freshness checking cannot catch that, because the value never changed — what changed was the world. Two things now run against it:
- A weekly holiday-integrity audit that compares calendars across years, flags expired placeholder dates, and catches regional days duplicating national ones. It is what caught the Papua New Guinea additions.
- Daily source provenance — every cited source is fetched, hashed and re-checked, so if the document behind a value is amended or disappears, that surfaces rather than sitting silently. See /provenance.
Neither is sufficient. Both are better than a last_confirmed date that only says someone looked.
Found something wrong?
Send the instrument. api@3l-groupconsulting.co.za — corrections with a primary source are acted on and credited here.